One piece of artwork admired in the contest for computer-generated art was among the 10 finalists–a surrealistic piece that looked like something out of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
When the other finalists stepped forward, they all looked to be twenty-something at the most. Then Mildred Jarrow Riley stepped forward. You could almost hear a collective gasp. Here was no punk rocker; no rapper. Riley, at the time, was 80-plus.
In this new age world, where computers are thought of as a young people’s genre, Riley sees them as just another medium to work with.
“I just think of them as a tool,” says Riley.
Born in Chicago in 1917, the Zuma Beach resident began her work in art as a child, drawing on paper bags. Raised in Los Angeles, she graduated from John Burrows High, but then married a Milwaukee man and moved there where she raised her children and was somewhat the socialite.
“I took all kinds of art courses,” she recalls. “I was never working toward a degree–just learning whatever techniques I could.”
She worked with pencil, conte crayon (a square, waxy, dense type of crayon) watercolors, oils and, when the new-fangled acrylics came out decades later, she worked with those too. She also worked in sculpture. One of her first shows took place in the Luntz Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin back in 1981.
When her husband died, she moved to Los Angeles with her children and renewed her interest in art, becoming a co-founder of both the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art. She also began to collect art herself.
Her entrance into the world of computers came about through serendipity–after a bout with breast cancer. As a recovering patient, she enrolled in various programs to help bring her back into the functioning world. One was an art program involving computers.
“I was using art to express my emotions,” she said, “releasing some of my emotions regarding cancer.”
Among the people she was working with was a young man named Dr. Paul Abell, who recognized that, with all her training in art, she could go beyond the original program of art-as-therapy into art-as-art.
“Her first artwork was very angry,” recalls Abell. “She was mad about having cancer, and the artwork showed it–in the colors and the objects.”
“Anger and rage were in my first paintings after my surgery,” confirms Riley. “Eventually, the emotional blackness subsided and a healing peace followed, giving way to an expressionistic representation of my philosophy of living … now I use the computer as an electronic paint brush to express and release my inner feelings.”
When she discovered the computer, it was accompanied by an intense desire to learn.
“I was very impatient,” says Riley. “After I recovered I told Paul ‘I don’t want to take courses in computers. I just want you to tell me what hardware to get, what software I need, then to hook it up and show me how to use it.’ “
Abell made his recommendations and she bought the equipment and was soon making computer art work that was as advanced as anybody was doing anywhere, worldwide.
Adobe Photoshop is the main program she uses. Sometimes she starts with a photograph and modifies it, and sometimes with her own hand-drawn conception.
“It’s a layered technique,” says Abell. “Sometimes she has as many as 60 layers on top of each other.”
She prints her work using the Giclee Ink-jet process where digital images are printed dot-by- dot, pixel-by-pixel, onto archival quality paper.
Originally, she had no way of keeping track of what technique she applied in what order, but now there are programs that record what you do step-by-step so at least she has some chance of being able to duplicate a certain “look” that she arrived at through experimentation.
Each of her works has a title, such as “Dante’s” referring to Dante’s Inferno. The subject matter is often so surreal one cannot discern what the original object was, but other times she shows the ocean. She has even taken pictures of her old oil paintings, scanned them into her computer and used them as a starting point for computer-generated art. Riley takes great pride in her success with her computer-generated art having been shown in local galleries in Los Angeles, including the Skirball and the Getty museums. She still keeps a few oil paintings around, but now she’d rather wield a mouse than a paintbrush, and stores her work on floppies or parked in cyberspace.
Abell, who teaches people how to do computer art, says, “I have been in this field for 10 years and I have never seen anybody approach this field with such wild abandon as Mildred. She pushes the computer to its limits.”
In fact, originally her computer would “lock up” when she asked too much of it, and Abell would drive over from the Valley and fix it.
“No matter how much memory it has,” he laments, “it seems like it’s never enough.”
Abell points out that all of Mildred’s previous art training has prepared her for her computer art, though there is “a certain dis-connection in that. With the computer you don’t have direct contact with the art work–you are working through a mouse–which affects the art work. It’s like walking on stilts.”
The advent of the personal Web site has made an agent unnecessary. Riley has appeared on “The Rosanne Show” and appeared in an Art Linkletter special interview. She has also been featured in national magazines.
Although Riley has a Web site to show her work, conversely she finds it more than slightly vexing to meet fans who have accessed her artwork on the net and downloaded it, but says, “If they don’t have the quality paper and quality printers that our printer does, it’s not the same–they don’t have the real thing.”
Riley was once known for her far-sightedness in collecting art. The walls of her homes in Milwaukee and later Los Angeles held the work of the famous names in art — Calder and Hockney among them. But that’s all water under the bridge now; and she even feels her once extensive art library is now obsolete, redundant and irrelevant to her present art goals — for Mildred Jarrow Riley is like the crew of Star Trek’s Enterprise, going where no man (or woman) has gone before.
“I’ve been everywhere,” she says, waving a hand over souvenirs from China, India and the like, “and I’ve done everything, but all I want to do now is work at this.”
Where can she go from here?
“Holographic art,” Abell predicts. “Three dimensional. That’s coming, and when it’s available, I’m sure Mildred will be there saying ‘Let’s go!’ “